Keeping an Eye Open
Essays on Art
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending.
“An engaging and empathetic volume.” —The New York Times Book Review
As Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting … But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.”
This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin. The seventeen essays gathered here help trace the arc from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism; they are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these sharply observed essays, English novelist Barnes (Sense of an Ending), levels his fine critical eye at the visual arts, principally focusing on French painting and the transition from romanticism to modernism. The Booker Prize winning novelist first wrote about art for his novel A History of the World in 10 Chapters (1989), which contains a study of Th odore G ricault's Raft of the Medusa; that study is this collection's stirring opener. French art remains Barnes's forte, and the book includes pieces on Eug ne Delacroix, douard Manet, Odilon Redon, and Georges Braque. He submits thoughts on these and other artists with sentences that coolly snap and continually delight. In his wonderful study of Edgar Degas's portrayals of women, Barnes knocks down the charge of misogyny and shows an argumentative spirit that is somewhat wanting in other places. "Do you constantly and obsessively fret at the representation of something you dislike or despise?" he provocatively asks. Barnes also revisits douard Vuillard's late paintings and Henri Fantin-Latour's star-studded group portraits; vividly brings out the crude bravado of Gustave Courbet, "a great painter, but also a serious publicity act"; and questions some of the more astronomical praise of Paul C zanne. He is equally deft on non-French artists, too. Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's work is "about as political as a hot dog," and Lucian Freud's pictures are exclusively about the "here and now." It's both a pleasure and an education to look over Barnes's shoulder as he interrogates, wonders at, and relishes works of art. He's a critic who prioritizes the objects themselves, and his work is always satisfying. Illus.
